The roof collapsed. The shingles litter the ground. The floor joists buckled, sending the main floor plummeting to the basement. Plywood covers the broken glass on the front of the building. The brick is falling off one side. There are two shopping carts in the vacant lot next door, and a guy is urinating across the street.

“Can you see it?” asked Jay Soulliere, grinning.

“It’s pretty cool,” said Gino Gesuale.

Motor Craft Ales is the latest — and most established — business planning to move to Drouillard Road, and everyone from the city to the neighbourhood BIA and community activists sees it as the long-awaited catalyst that struggling Ford City needs.

“We’re pretty excited about it, no question,” said Bridget Scheuerman, executive director of the local business improvement association. “We feel it could be the kick-start we’ve been looking for.”

Owners Gesuale and Soulliere have submitted an offer to buy a derelict building on Drouillard at Ontario Street. They want to convert it into a microbrewery, taproom and store to expand Motor Craft Ales, which they operate out of Motor Burger, their popular restaurant on Erie Street.

The city acquired the building on Drouillard in a failed tax sale in 2014 and is selling it for a “nominal” amount, said planner Greg Atkinson. The sale is conditional on rezoning the site from residential to commercial. The city is recommending the rezoning and has already approved a tax break worth more than $100,000 over 10 years.

Gesuale and Soulliere bought the vacant lot next door from the city last year in a tax sale. The lot will provide parking and room to expand.

A city report on the building’s condition is blunt. It’s “very bad.” Built in the 1920s, it’s believed to have been a grocery store once, but it’s been vacant at least 25 years, maybe 40. No one really knows. The city was going to demolish it.

Still, there’s something about the single-storey red brick structure. It’s typical of the modest storefronts that line the street and were once the heart of a thriving community before Ford Motor Company moved its headquarters and main assembly plant to Oakville in 1953 and the suburbs grew up. Now, it’s the type of walkable neighbourhood that people are returning to.

A long-vacant building at 1207 Drouillard Rd., pictured April 4, 2017, may be renovated into a brewery by Gino Gesuale and Jay Souilliere, owners of Motor Burger.Dax Melmer /
Windsor Star

Gesuale and Soulliere will save the foundation and four walls. They’ll also save the mural on the north wall depicting, appropriately for a brewery, rum runners during Prohibition.

Gesuale isn’t sure how they’ll start, maybe shore up the walls with braces and use a crane to drop in an excavator or send it over a ramp and through the front to clear the debris.

All told, with the renovation and brewing equipment, “it’s a million-dollar project,” he said.

“It’s a different project, definitely a different project,” he said.

Said Soulliere, “A lot of people develop in a place that has a base, a lot of foot traffic. This doesn’t have much of a base.”

They’ve gotten offers to go to Detroit. They had another restaurant planned in Midtown but decided against it.

“It just didn’t feel right,” said Soulliere.

“We wanted to stay local,” Gesuale said.

“We really believe in this city,” he said. “We always have.”

They opened Motor Burger in 2010, when there was double-digit unemployment.

And they believe in Ford City. They like the edgy, gritty feel, like Detroit.

“It feels right for us,” said Soulliere.

They’re intrigued by what Slows Bar BQ did for Corktown in Detroit. Owner Phillip Cooley bought the building on Michigan Avenue for $45,000 and had to post security 24 hours a day. The popular restaurant went on to help lead a renaissance in the historic neighbourhood.

“It takes someone to jump in with both feet,” said Soulliere. “If we could be a catalyst for more people to come, that would be awesome.”

A long-vacant building at 1207 Drouillard Rd., pictured April 4, 2017, may be renovated into a brewery by Gino Gesuale and Jay Souilliere, owners of Motor Burger.Dax Melmer /
Windsor Star

The report to council’s planning committee April 18 notes how craft alcohol has exploded over the last five years. Four guys from Indiana walked into Motor Burger on a Saturday recently. They ate, drank and bought more beer to go. Then they went to Walkerville Brewery. They hit a different city every other weekend to sample the microbreweries, they told Gesuale and Soulliere.

Ford City has been “on kind of a good roll,” said Marina Clemens the long-time executive director of Drouillard Place.

There have been new businesses and community groups — a reclaimed wood and furniture business, a sushi and food shop, pet bakery, tax business, art studio and an event centre in the former Our Lady of the Rosary Church. There’s also a community garden, farmers’ market in the summer and barbecue and fireworks for Victoria Day.

The business improvement association hopes to offer grants to fix facades, hang banners, refresh street furniture and post new signs at the gateways to Ford City on Riverside Drive and Seminole Street. It’s promoting the area as a place to find independent, unique businesses.

“No big boxes,” said Scheuerman.

But an established business like Motor Burger’s Motor Craft Ales is different.

“This is that big signal of confidence,” said Atkinson. “Someone is putting a lot of money into the neighbourhood. Once that signal is there, safer investors will follow.”

Said Scheuerman, “That’s just what we need to encourage other people, businesses to see past what past impressions have been of Drouillard Road and to see a future.”

Clemens hopes a microbrewery will draw young people. They’re more entrepreneurial, she said.

“They think outside the box and don’t have memories of the bad old days.”

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